Profiling Emma Watson, one of the UK's brightest young football players
Emma Watson, at just 17, has had a remarkable rise with both Rangers and Scotland. Her coaches tell her story.
Emma Watson is in demand right now. The 17-year-old is ripping it up for Rangers and having made her senior Scotland debut in April, the exciting attacker scored her first senior goal as a teenager days later in a 4-0 win over Costa Rica – two of them, in fact.
Now, she’s being linked with some of the biggest clubs across the border, but those that know her talk of a young girl who will firmly be keeping her head on her shoulders, such is the demand of the journey Watson has been on just to get to this stage.
Duelling school with her football, both intertwined with education, travelling constantly from home near Edinburgh to Glasgow and back to play for one of Scotland’s biggest clubs, and a family who have maintained she remains grounded throughout.
“A lot of girls at that age just chat, but Emma was focused, wanted to play the game…”
Cliff Barraclough was one of the first to spot Watson’s talent, when she was just a mere six-year-old at Primary School.
“I taught at Bruntsfield School and Emma played there when she was just a kid,” he recalls. “She came along and immediately she was pretty natural at football, even at six years old.”
Immediately, a common trait many of her former coaches pick out about her stood out, her determination to become better, even at such a young age.
“A lot of it was just passion and love for the game. A lot of girls at that age just chat, but Emma was focused, wanted to play the game and not do the social stuff. She’d talk before and after, but during she was 100% focused on the football.
“She understood the game, even very young. She watched a lot of football, her big brother played. It was a big interest of hers and from a very young age it was quite clear it’s what she wanted to do. Her balance and the way she moved, even at that age you can tell people who can change direction quickly and just aware of other players on the pitch. She would pick the right pass, she had it all from a really young age and worked really hard to get better.”
From Bruntsfield, Watson progressed to Broughton High School where she’s just finished her exams a year after going professional with Rangers.
Broughton High School is one of seven schools in Scotland that in 2012 were chosen as a Scottish FA Performance School, a programme designed to offer extra football training to some of the most talented boys and girls around the country, with Broughton picked as Edinburgh’s school, along with schools in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Kilmarnock, Motherwell and Falkirk.
“Emma joined the school four years ago as she was going into secondary school,” says Keith Wright, Head Coach at the Scottish FA Performance School at Broughton. “It’s an elite programme so there’s trials for all the schools. I first met Emma when she applied and she was the only girl to get through, she’d have been around 11 or 12 at the time.
“It’s difficult to judge them at that age, but it needs to be decided before they go into secondary school and she was one of 10 that got selected in 2018.”
Alongside this, Watson had been playing for Boroughmuir Thistle since 2013, largely at 5-a-side and 7-a-side level, before stepping up to 11-a-side, and also joined Rangers’ elite performance centre, where she would travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow to train in the evening three nights a week after school.
“She was travelling at 11 years old, that showed the commitment she had,” says Ross Stormonth, who was working in the Rangers elite performance centre at the time. “She had that desire. We’d finish at 10pm and she would come and do that from Edinburgh three nights a week, but she committed to that, which was incredible.”
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